Press ‘Play’ for a song that wasn’t really in the movie. i’m kinda only half cheating through because Slaine performs other songs on the soundtrack that i can’t find anywhere. Plus he’s also in the movie, so chu’ up.

Ramblings: Affleck Paints THE TOWN Red

Final Proof: 4 Shots

You know how you drink with Good Hood and Bad Hood? They’re like Good Cop / Bad Cop except they’re criminals and one of them doesn’t drink a drop of booze and the other one’s shitfaced on whiskey he drank in his dirty bathroom even before he got to the bar. The Good Hood is asking you crap about yourself ’cause he cares and he’s so nice you’d even set him up with your little sister because there’s honor in his system, while the Bad Guy is ‘accidentally’ burning you with the tip of his cigarettes to see if you’ll be dumb enough to start a fight with him so he can kick your ass and break your knee for the hell of it. The nice thing is, even if they’re opposties, they play off each other well because the evening would be too boring if you were just pounding Shirley Temple slammers with the Good Hood but the night would be less sincere if you were just chugging Jaëger and Red Bull until you passed out or killed someone. Balance through the extremes is a good thing and also what The Town was like.

The Town is this working class neighborhood of Boston where a lot of people work on robbing banks. Ben Affleck grew up in another neighborhood of Boston called Cambridge which is more “class” than “working” but that didn’t stop him from directing 2 movies about the wrong side of the tracks. Normally, i’d rag on him about slumming it to make a buck but there’s two things that are stopping me. The first one is that i think he’s sincere and the second is that he does a great freaking job.

Ben Affleck should be called Clint Penn because his directing style is like Sean Penn’s and Clint Eastwood’s, which is a good thing because those guys rock and so does Ben. These guys are able to avoid stereotypes and build real filmscapes with real people and real situations. Affleck doesn’t break new ground in The Town but the ground he covers he covers really really well.

So what’s keeping this from being a 5-shot review? Just a couple minor things. The movie is a little long and while i liked the romance because it was realistic and not romantic, there was TMI at times not because they were dishing out a lot of gross personal stuff, just too much stuff period with everyone talking about their troubled pasts all the time. The movie was 2 hours and 4 minutes and Ben-Gay coulda whittled this down a little by cutting some of the boy-girl chatter.

No one’s sadder than me to say that the other downer in The Town was Blake Lively. i mean, c’mon, Blake Lively is. Only problem is she’s also out of her league in this picture. You know how i know everyone is a good actor in this movie? They all speak with accents and you know me, i don’t know shit about movies but i know a good actor uses foreign accents like how all the actors in The Town spoke with an Irish accent. Blake Lively tried but just couldn’t get the hang of it so you know what Ben told her? Swear to god and you won’t believe but that’s too bad for you because it’s true and you can even ask Miss D. He gave her the same advice The A-Team director gave Quinton Jackson: “If you can’t act, mumble so people will assume you’re acting.” The upside is that Blake looks really hot as the slutty ex-girlfriend.

Blake Lively in the Bar None

So yeah, i recommend you visit The Town. It has a perfect balance of action, drama, realistic romance, cool dialog and then more great action. You get the Good Hood and the Bad Hood in the ‘hood of The Town.

Buzz Kills (Watch Out for Spoilers)

Sex: 2 Shots

Here’s some music from the juiced-box and the soundtrack to peruse by: Ray Lamontagne – Jolene

As i mentioned up there, we got Blake lookin’ Lively as Krista Coughlin, the working class single mother bar slut ex girlfriend. The other cool thing is she uses words you’ll never hear her use on Gossip Girl if you’re into hot girls swearing and you know i am. What she lacks in acting talent here, she more than makes up for in hotness. Here’s what i mean.

Click On The Shot For Wallpaper Size

Here’s how i know Blake Lively and Ben Affleck are famous: when they have sex they don’t take their clothes off. They do show glimpses of how Lively Blake’s ass looks in jeans but not nearly long enough. There’s some nice shots of Blake down in my drawers, however, that you may gaze upon to your hardon’s contents.

The other lead female in The Town is Rebecca Hall, who i may remember as Vicky in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona. Here’s how i know she’s not as famous as Blake Lively but still a little famous anyway: when she does Ben, they’re naked but they don’t show anything. Actually, that’s how we’re supposed to know he really loves Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) and not Krista because he bothers to take of Claire’s clothes. That’s the definition of love right there, peeps. “Love” means you care enough to see her naked. Anyway, Doug MacRay (Ben’s character) doesn’t give a shit because he gets to bang both of them, love or not. What’s not to love?

There’s a couple more shots of her rolling around in my drawers at the end of this post.

As for the miscellaneous sex in The Town, there’s not much other than the flash of a nipple in a strip club. i also noted in my notes that the lovely and talented Corena Chase did a stunning job as FBI Agent Quinlan, so stunning that i contacted her for an interview but i’m not as famous as we thought because she didn’t even bother to respond. Anyway, here’s a shot of yet one more woman who’s too good for me.

For those of you more into high-rises than cubby holes, i got some Ben Affleck for you. Tell you what, Ben is pretty damn buff. He takes off his shirt and does chinups in the hall and his 6-pack abs look a lot different than my 6-pack gut.

[Press ‘Play’ for some Slaine drinking music. i swear to fucking god he says “Yo Al, I think they got a problem” at the beginning.]

One really rock and roll thing about The Town is Slaine. i feel Slaine. A lot. You could say i go around feeling Slaine if it didn’t sound gay because we all know that if i decide to go that way i’m going to Michelle Rodriguez. Slaine is this white rapper from Boston who sounds like a raw Eminem and apparently he hangs with Affleck because not only does he contribute songs to the soundtrack of The Town and Gone, Baby, Gone (Ben’s directorial debut), he also acts in both of them. Can he act? Better than Blake, babe.

It’s not exactly rock and roll but Affleck chose to end the movie with one of all my all time favorite cigarette songs. Defining a cigarette song would require a whole new post and more night than i got left but i’ll get around to it eventually; suffice to say it’s a song so sincere you want to smoke a cigarette as you listen. The song i posted at the intro to the Sex section above, Ray Lamontagne’s “Jolene”, is as cigarette as a song gets and i appreciate Ben’s closing his film to the strains of “Jolene, I ain’t about to go straight / It’s too late / I found myself face down in a ditch / Booze in my hair and blood on my lips / A picture of you holding a picture of me in the pocket of my old blue jeans”.

Also very rock and roll in The Town is the action scenes. Affleck does a very nice job shooting the action and he includes more than i’d expected so i really got to tip my hat to him. Next round’s on me, Ben and i was so pleasantly surprised by the rock and roll attitude you hit at times that i promise not to make any JLo references or to bring up that fucking hilarious South Park episode about you.

Slurred Speeches

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) is talking to Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) about how his dad acted when his mother abandoned the household:

He sat in the kitchen and drank a case of beer while I went out and asked people if they’d seen my mother.

Doug attends an AA meeting and a recovering alcoholic tells this story (i’m paraphrasing here):

This is the story of a priest who comes up to this guy at the bar. ‘I’ll tell you right now,’ the guy says, ‘I got nothing against you, Father, but I don’t believe in God. See, a few years back I was hiking in Alaska and I went snowblind in a blizzard. I got lost and I knew I was going to die and so I promised to God that if he saved me, I’d believe in him for the rest of my life. Then an Eskimo came and rescued me.’

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3 thoughts on “Booze Revooze: A Drinker’s Skewed View of THE TOWN”

I am soooo glad this film is actually a good one. I saw the trailer for it a while back (I think when I went and saw Inception) and I felt it looked a little too much like that godawful Joaquin Phoenix film We Own The Night, except with criminals and my Square Jaw hisself, Ben Affleck. I was worried that it’d be a bit of a flop, a bit of a mastubatory work of non-art from B-Fleck, but I’m glad that you think it’s pretty good. Now I am looking forward to seeing it!!!

Oh, as usual, awesome pics in the drawers. Nothing like a good nip-slip to get a man moist.